Once you have become aware that you are not and still you are – that the ego is no longer there, the self is no longer there, yet still you are – you have a totally new experience of your own being. (Osho)
Sometimes i am blissful and so sure, so assured while I’m working. What is that? I suppose it is still a habit to equate result–aesthetic result–with proof of ‘success’? ‘productivity’? that I’m ‘making progress’. Horrors! i felt such worthless despair yesterday as i regarded my work and saw so many problems...i had spent so long...and simply didn't like it - the look of it - the look of myself? in process?
I came back today and contemplated how I might shift those (literal) problems in the image…and I was interested and absorbed in the contemplation and in the stretch of one (long but utterly immersed) session the piece was transformed, (in a way I could not previously have imagined) and I was proud again, assured again. Oh how fragile. How fleeting. i suppose the only remedy is experience; learning to trust one’s life, one’s process. I suppose this is why the God thing is popular.
The other mystery is when to take a risk, that leap cliche. How vague. I mean, if you're getting tight, just splatter a glob of white across the whole thing? Is there some in-between? Some point where, I guess, I suppose, spontaneity becomes skillful, so experience becomes embedded in the act and evident in the act (and definitively leads to the afore-mentioned ‘success’?) OR just simply, utterly destroy. Just completely change direction...?
I know this doesn’t mean gessoing over the whole thing; you still have to relate to it, engage a conversation like an adult, can’t storm away in a huff, or spit on your accusing reflection and run madly into the street. But it does mean throwing away caution, hesitation. Do that thing you wonder about doing, the impulse you keep resisting. And then, (splash of vermillion!) then you have released all the tension and preciousness and then you are back in it and what is more, perhaps you find something: some of that pure emotion just caught the substrate on fire and really...hmm, there is something interesting there. And since you just utterly sacrificed rather than parsing around ineffectively trying to re-habilitate the walking-dead, you’re free.
The whole thing is really about orientation: if I am precious, if I cling to that one special little thing because I'm afraid it will never happen again, (scarcity) I am arrested, frozen in fear. Unable actually to speak. Unable to relate. Stiff and tense and dead and boring. Rigid. And then this is what I paint: scared mousey little marks. But how can I ever articulate the enormity of the tension in that moment? The desperate clinging to a success that absolutely will never come again...knowing I will be plunged again into the maelstrom of uncertainty, the horrible liminality of no-self!
Well, it is only horrible without faith, without trust, without generocity, without the willingness to experience and to give. Because as I worked the other day, I glimpsed for a moment: myself without this costume, without this definition, without this familiar routine and script and cycle of fear/doubt, the familiar voices going round in their track, and i saw that it was a skin. A story. A definition among so many forever fleeting failed attempts to define myself. And the kaleidoscope of whom-might-i-be that unfurled itself for just a second, the ME without ME: pure being and all of the possiblities...Well. That really was miraculous.